Destruction as opportunities: the debate about the bombed historic Naples at the dawn of reconstruction, 1943-1946

The city of Naples has been one of Italy’s most bombed cities of world war II due to its harbour and industries. Despite this tremendous scenario the random destruction also gave start to a period of great turmoil for the urban city planning. The dense centro antico, grown in height on a narrow urban fabric, was historically marked by problems of disorder and density. Before the war several urban plans had tried to resolve the matter following approaches that varied with progressive attention to the monument and its settings. As early as in 1945 a Commission was set up for the study of a new masterplan, involving the most important scholars of the city, such as Luigi Cosenza and Roberto Pane. The latter had expressed his views on the town reconstruction already in 1943, stating that it was necessary to take advantage of the new circumstances, which in the tragedy of the moment offered renewal opportunities through a careful process of diradamento (thinning out). Despite the rich debate that from that moment on marked the second half of the 1940s, in which a certain nonchalance towards the urban heritage cohabited with the rise of the first instances of protection for the ambiente (setting) of monuments, the reconstruction of Naples had a different outcome and betrayed the hopes that had inspired it. Today, the city displays many traces of this process: large reconstructions, some conservation areas and even the presence of war wounds that still emerge within the contemporary urban fabric, as in via Marina. Starting from the outcomes of the war, the paper outlines this rich debate on urban reconstruction, highlighting the theoretical progresses and the different outcomes in terms of loss and conservation for such a relevant built heritage as the historic centre of Naples.